Haunted
by HideousBlob
Summary: Zim accidentally investigates a haunted house. No pairings. T for slight gore, descriptions of blood, etc. COMPLETED FIC.


an: this is another reupload of an old fic.

A/N: This was going to be about Zim observing Dib for a change, but it turns out Zim's bad at that and was spotted almost immediately.

* * *

Zim popped open the trunk about half an inch with a twist of his wrist. He peered out through the narrow opening. His own breathing was quite loud and harsh in the small space. He bit his lip and tried to quiet himself. How good was Dib's hearing anyway?

Where were they? Zim just saw trees from here. If Dib had carted him out to the middle of nowhere to look at fairies or something Zim was going to be very annoyed.

He heard the door open. He withdrew into the trunk, slamming it shut.

He heard Dib walk around the perimeter of the car. The air in the trunk was very hot and close and stuffy and wasn't of very good quality. Zim was gasping and sweaty.

Another of the car doors opened. Zim heard Dib move something around. He was humming. He couldn't carry a tune.

"Okay!" Zim heard something beeping. "Video camera on. This is Agent Mothman of the Swollen Eyeball network. I'm outside of a documented haunted house! I'm going to go in it and... document it some more! With video evidence this time!"

Dib had gone out to document things? But that was what he did all the time! Didn't he ever do anything else?

Dib's footsteps headed away from the car. Zim pushed the trunk back open and pulled in a deep breath of semi-fresh air. It was still Earth air, which smelled terrible and burned his throat.

He wondered what he'd been expecting Dib to have planned for the evening. Certainly not a social event. The other humans had some inexplicable distaste of Dib. Not that Dib wasn't inherently distasteful, but Zim didn't understand why other humans would understand that, as they were also awful. Besides, Dib didn't follow them home, slip insulting notes under their doors, mock them at every opportunity-

Okay, the mission was to watch Dib, not take revenge. Zim would think about other things before he got too angry to think at all. How about getting out of the car?

He started climbing out of the trunk only to have it fall shut on the softest part of his belly and very nearly chop him in half. He had to pry himself out with all four of his Pak legs, using them against each other as levers.

At least he was out of the trunk now. He'd been in the trunk of Dib's car many times, and usually not by choice.

The car was parked facing a large house that appeared to be in an advanced state of disrepair. Zim adjusted his disguise, checking it in the rearview mirror. He looked decent. 'Decent' was about as far as he was willing to go in regards to any human disguise. He far preferred his real face. He still looked better than any actual human, though.

He was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans for an extra layer of disguise. Dib had been pretending to ignore him lately, which meant he must be up to something horrible and dangerous.

Zim did not like wearing human clothes. The sweatshirt was okay, it was soft, at least. The jeans were stiff and had chafy seams and were a little tighter around the waist than Zim particularly liked.

Zim realized he had just wasted about five minutes trying to get the jeans to sit comfortably on his hips. This was stupid, he was an Invader.

He took the video recording device out of his pocket, checked it, returned it to his pocket and marched up to the front door of the house.

There was a little sign on the doorknob: Please do not enter. Paranormal investigation in progress.

Zim took off the sign and tucked it into his Pak. Dib would never see it again. Small victories.

He reached for the doorknob.

Ah, wait. Dib could be right on the other side. He pulled away, shifting his weight onto first one foot and then the other.

He peeked through one of the windows and saw no one. Dib must be further inside the house.

Zim turned the doorknob, slowly, as to make no noise. He slipped inside, glanced around to verify the lack of Dib in the room, and crawled up the wall to cling to the ceiling. His left front Pak leg went straight through the rotting plaster. He yelped, slipping and scrabbling against the ceiling with his hands for purchase.

"Do you hear that?" Dib hissed from an adjacent room, most likely speaking to no one at all. "That sounds like legitimate poultergeist activity! I'm gonna check it out!"

Zim tugged his leg out of the plaster and hurried across the ceiling. He wasn't familiar with the place and he was a little disoriented from hanging upside down and he wound up colliding face-first with some kind of hanging... glass... thing. Some human thing. He backed up and rubbed at his sore face.

A door creaked open. Zim flattened himself to the ceiling. He couldn't do much about the joints of his secondary legs sticking up. Or, er, down. Away from the surface of the ceiling, anyway. He also couldn't really do anything about having green skin that stood out against the gray plaster like grass sprouting through a crack in the pavement.

He heard nothing for a minute, apart from his hammering pulse.

"Hello," Dib said, not sounding in the least surprised. "Fancy seeing you here."

Zim said the first thing that came to mind. "I'm a ghost."

"Yeah, I wish."

Zim backed up and turned around, looking down at Dib.

"You thought you could escape me, didn't you? Well, you can't," Zim said. All the blood had run into his head. He was having difficulty coming up with good banter.

Dib's video camera was pointing at the floor. A disguise this good wasn't even worth trying to disprove, apparently. Because surely, he should have been filming Zim because Zim was what the humans called "an enormous deal". Humans and their weird obsession with discount pricing.

Dib folded his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow. "Feeling a little neglected, are we?"

Zim sputtered. "What are you talking about?"

Tiring of being upside down, he jumped down to the floor and landed with what he considered to be the agility of a cat. He waved his arms a little to keep his balance.

"You know what I'm talking about," Dib said, "I haven't been around your house in months. I've had other paranormal activity to investigate, but I'm sure you think it's about you. Because everything's about you."

"Oh yeah? You think I'm here because of you," Zim countered. "Don't you, Dib? Don't you!"

Dib sighed slightly. "Well, yes. Because you are."

Zim was suddenly distracted by his uncomfortable jeans, which had shifted so that one of the buttons jabbed into his flesh, and had to spend a few minutes adjusting them while Dib found other things to look at. "I made the mistake of thinking you were doing something useful with your time," he said finally. Which was true. If Zim had realized Dib was going to just be screwing around on other people's property he wouldn't have bothered to come. He'd honestly thought Dib had the sense to spend his free time scheming against his most dangerous enemy... Zim's mistake. "But you're... not. So I'll go." He went for the front door.

It was gone.

Zim scurried backwards. "The door's gone," he said aloud. The room felt cold, suddenly, and rather damp.

"Wow!" Dib took a picture of the door-less wall.

"Don't just stand there and take pictures of it! We have to get out of here!" Zim's heart was in his throat. The walls were closing in.

"Wow!" Dib said again, and hefted his video camera. "Behold! Moving walls! There's no scientific explanation for that!"

Oh, so the walls were actually closing in. Zim had thought for a moment that he was just... never mind. "We're going to die!"

The space was very small already. Zim backed up until he collided with Dib's legs and sat down on the floor.

"Behold! Existential fear with no logical cause!" Dib pointed the video camera down at Zim, who stared at the lens, trying to wrap his mind around this idiocy. No logical cause? The walls were about to crush them. "Take this one with a grain of salt, though. The subject in frame is a moron. Oh, and a space alien."

Looking up at Dib, Zim noticed something on the ceiling, up past the human's large annoying head. The hole where his leg had gone through earlier.

Zim hurried up the wall. He pounded on the ceiling with his fist and a large piece of it crumbled off and hit Dib in the face. Zim crawled through the resulting space into damp, wood-smelling darkness.

He looked down back into the room he'd just escaped and saw Dib standing there, looking around at the encroaching walls, which moved without sound or any visible means of propulsion.

Dib crushed between four walls skin bursting bones breaking blood everywhere horrible coppery acidic human blood-

Zim shook himself out of the daydream, if one could call it that- sometimes they were more like some kind of mental attack. Dib was looking up at him with his eyes wide in realization. Oh, right, moving walls could crush you! Now who was the idiot?

Zim almost said that aloud but didn't.

He hooked the collar of Dib's shirt with the tip of a Pak leg and hauled him up through the hole. Dib squawked and pulled away, very nearly falling right back into the room, which would have served him right.

Zim watched as the walls slammed together on that glass thing he'd hit with his face. It shattered. Zim recoiled.

"Real ghost activity!" Dib said. "And I have it on tape!"

Zim was trapped in a small space with his worst enemy, and no way to escape, and it smelled bad in here. And his jeans were too tight. He should have stayed home and watched Plastic Surgeries Gone Wrong the way GIR had wanted him to. Or at least he should have let Dib be crushed to death.

"Behold!" Zim was looking into a bright light- Dib's video camera. "My annoying tag-along is having a nervous breakdown. Zim, what are you experiencing right now?"

"I..." Zim rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. His skin felt warm. This sweatshirt was a bit too heavy. The video camera light was blinding. "What?" Nervous breakdown? Hardly. He was breathing a little hard from the exertion, was all. Dib was heavy.

"Is anything trying to invade your psyche and control you?" Dib asked.

Zim didn't... think so... he wasn't entirely sure what that meant, actually. "I have to get out of here!" This much Dib babble was going to turn him insane.

"Hm, okay," Dib said to the camera. "He wants to escape, which is pretty typical for the subject in question, actually."

Zim tapped on the walls and ceiling and found a spongey spot above them. He scratched at it with both hands. It turned to powder and got in his eyes.

"Man! The first ever video of an alien in a haunted house. This is awesome!" Dib was burbling.

Ungrateful wretch. "You could be helping!" Zim snapped. "This is your fault!"

"I sure did make you follow me here. Not." Dib turned his video camera around to get a good view of the cramped, stinking space they were in. "Okay, so, to recap, in case you missed anything, I entered a haunted house to investigate." Zim opened his mouth to respond (he hadn't missed anything and he didn't appreciate the recap) but then realized Dib was narrating for the camera. "This alien I've been chasing for a while followed me in. This is him." Zim was now staring into the video camera light again. "His name's Zim. He's an Irken Invader bent on destroying mankind and he lives at 355 Oak Street, Crapville, Michigan, United States, you can come collect him for dissection at any time, you know!"

Zim hissed at the camera and reached out to confiscate it. Dib had the audacity to slap his hand away. "Okay," Dib continued, "so when Zim showed up, the room we were in compressed into a dot and we escaped through the ceiling into some kind of crawl space and now we're stuck."

Zim imagined living here for weeks while he was being slowly poisoned to death by noxious human waste fluids generated by Dib, and he shuddered.

"Was that a chill?" Dib asked. "Did a ghost go through you?"

"What? No." He scratched at the ceiling some more.

"Hm," Dib said. "There doesn't seem to be much to record in this crawlspace." He reached up and easily knocked a hole in the ceiling with one fleshy fist. A hunk of plaster hit Zim on the head and some dust got into his mouth. While he sputtered, Dib crawled up through the ceiling.

The increasing physical strength of the human was cause for concern, but could be dealt with later. Knowing Dib, he wouldn't even realize that he could probably, um, strangle Zim with his bare hands. To death.

Zim swallowed and followed Dib through the hole.

They were in a large bedroom, with a wooden floor and a big double bed. There was a window taking up most of one wall. Everything was dusty. There were things scattered across the floor... wooden figures, dolls, some thing on wheels, assorted strange human playthings, or at least Zim was assuming they were all toys...

Zim's chest tightened. His heart fluttered and he struggled to take a breath. He felt as if something was... squeezing him. From the inside.

Dib aimed the camera at the floor, the walls, the ceiling... he hadn't noticed that Zim was struggling to breathe, probably having a bad reaction to all this dust. What was even worth filming in here?

Oh.

The dust was gone. A woman sat in a rocking chair in the corner of the room. Her eyes were vacant. White bandages covered her head. Some kind of flowy black thing enveloped her body.

It was daylight outside the window, and not midnight anymore. Zim walked over to the window, looked out and saw some kind of contraption with a horse tied to it where Dib's car should be parked.

"Hey!"

There was a pressure on his throat... Dib's knuckles against the back of his neck... it was dark again, a cool breeze chilled his face...

Zim had opened the window and swung one leg over the sill. Dib had a fistful of his sweatshirt collar.

"You were possessed just now, weren't you?" Dib was, of course, filming all this.

"I..."

"You were going to jump!" Dib sounded ecstatic.

Zim scrambled back inside and slammed the window shut. As he did so, he realized the window was a potential means of escape.

The window refused to re-open.

Of course.

"What did you feel?" Dib was asking.

"Nothing," Zim replied.

"Come on. Please! I've never been possessed! What's it like?"

"I felt nothing." The nothing had been so total and encompassing that Zim almost welcomed back the flutterings of fear in his belly.

"Fine, don't tell me." Dib filmed the ceiling for no apparent reason.

Zim tapped at the edges of the window. He looked at his pale reflection in the glass and felt like he was looking at someone else. As if that wasn't him, even though he knew it was his own face.

Never mind that now. He looked over his shoulder. That thing in the rocking chair was gone.

Dib followed his gaze. "What?"

"Eh, there's nothing there." Not anymore.

Zim pounded on the window. It wouldn't break. His Pak also proved useless against the window. All right... if it had shattered into his face it might have put his eye out anyway, what a hassle that would have been...

Zim looked over the room and found a door leading out. He tried the knob and it opened. Not only did it open, but it seemed to turn by itself when his fingers touched the metal. He realized he was breathing harshly through his mouth, and his throat was getting sore because of it. He swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment.

The door led to a hallway, long and dusty and dark. Zim tipped his head back and sniffed at the air with his mouth slightly open. There was something very wrong with the smell here. He gagged. The roof of his mouth burned.

Something cold slid over Zim's cheek and down to his chin. It felt like a hand. A frigid hand.

Zim was sweating. "Who's there?"

No one was there.

Dib made a strangled noise of excitement. "What do you mean, 'who's there'?"

Zim reached up to try to turn away the invisible hand. It had already left, however. "Nothing. I said nothing!" He just wanted to go home and put on comfortable clothing and turn on the TV and have a snack. That was all.

A young woman stood there, her eyes empty bloody sockets. She had no hair, and a scar across her forehead.

Then she was gone.

There had been scratch marks on her cheeks. She'd clawed out her own eyes...

Zim backed up. He heard a woman screaming over and over again. Now she was at the end of the hallway, doubled over on the ground, screaming. She vanished, but Zim still heard screaming.

Oh, Zim was screaming.

Dib was filming him screaming.

"STOP THAT!" Zim was shaking all over. "Look what you've DONE!"

Dib didn't have the decency to be ashamed, he never did. "Hey, you followed me here. This is a normal mission for me, you know."

Normal? Dib did this routinely?

Zim swallowed past a lump in his throat. "How many of these creatures are there?"

"In here?" Dib filmed the ceiling, walls, floor... "I don't know! I'm going to find out!"

Zim had meant to inquire about how many of these things inhabited Earth. Too many, probably. Well, one was too many, really.

But no one had said Invading would be easy, right? Eh? Besides, Dib wasn't afraid at all...

Zim headed down the hallway, head lowered and hands jammed in pockets, Dib faithfully trailing after with the camera.

His jeans were riding up again. If Zim had known he would end up in here with a ghost thing he would have worn his normal uniform.

His boots were splashing in something. He looked down. There was a thin layer of scentless blood on the floor. Sure, of course.

He heard faint whispering.

There was a door opening off of the hallway into a dark room. Zim looked through it.

That woman lay on the floor sprawled on her back, one arm flung carelessly out to the side. The other arm was bent, the hand at her throat, fingers hooked into torn and bloody flesh. Her eyes were covered with a cloth. The lobotomy scar was now mostly hidden by wispy bangs.

Tearing out her eyes and throat like that must have taken incredible strength. Humans didn't have claws.

(((do you see me)))

Zim's mouth was dry. The words had just appeared in his head out of nowhere. "See what?" he replied, though certainly there was nothing to reply to-

(((you are LYING)))

Pain flared in Zim's head and the next he knew he was kneeling on the ground in the blood that wasn't really there and he was touching his throat, his claws partially detracted- just enough for him to feel their tips on his skin. He hadn't worn gloves.

He could feel his own pulse. "No," he said in a husky, stifled voice, shaking his head slightly. "Very funny. Why would you want to-"

((i can see what you are))

((KILLER))

His claws pricked his flesh ever so slightly. A choked cry came from somewhere in his chest.

A meaty human hand fastened on his wrist, pulling away the traitorous claws. The hand was so hot, and so large with its five long fingers that it made Zim's wrist look like a toothpick. It wasn't natural. It was wrong. After all this time on Earth, it was a shock sometimes to look at a human hand and remember how wrong it was.

(RELEASE HIM)

"You hear it again, don't you?"

(YOU HAVE NOT DONE YOUR JOB, BOY)

"Show yourself!" Dib aimed the camera everywhere but at the corpse on the floor. This iteration of the woman didn't seem inclined to vanish like the others. Instead it was rotting as Zim watched it.

She screamed again. Dib was holding Zim's arms pinned to his side by wrapping one arm around Zim's upper body, keeping his claws from going right back to his own very important blood vessels.

(RELEASE HIM)

Dib couldn't hear that at all, could he?

"Dib, you don't hear a, uh, a woman, do you?" Zim inquired, his tone light. Dib let go of him.

"No, and that means the camera's not getting it either!" Dib was obviously annoyed.

(YOUR FATHER HAS RUINED YOU, BOY)

"Stop that," Zim told the corpse, "he can't hear you. Nor can he see you." Zim wished he couldn't see her either.

"What's she saying? Who's there?"

Zim turned and looked over his shoulder. "I thought you were some kinda expert!"

"Don't screw around! Come on! Why can't I see her?"

(CREATURE OF DEATH AND MADNESS I WILL HAVE YOU)

Zim's throat and chest convulsed and he heard himself speaking but without anything of tone or inflection that was his own. "Release him to me! I want him!"

"Wuh... wow! Observe the ghost has taken an intense, immediate dislike to the alien. Both of them are completely real!" Dib said for the camera.

"Give him to me," the ghost said, using Zim's body. He pawed at his throat. "I want his pain and hatred. Help. DIB!" Zim reached out and grabbed Dib's pant leg, managing to move of his own volition. Dib recoiled and sort of kicked him away a little.

"Okay, the ghost wants to kill the alien," said Dib. "I think they're going to have a fight!"

Zim couldn't fight the ghost if the ghost was controlling him from the inside! He balked at telling Dib that, though. "Get me out of this place!" he cried instead.

"I don't know how to get out," was Dib's reply.

"What?"

Dib shrugged.

What kind of stupid, bad expert was he? Fine. Zim was used to having to do everything himself, after all!

Zim wrapped his arms around his chest, hoping that in some way it would keep the ghost from getting back in. Somehow. "Get out," he said. "Leave me, echo of human! YOU WILL NOT HAVE ME!"

Dib was still filming.

(i want you)

"Too bad!"

(i always get what i want)

"I said no!"

(i feel your fear i want your fear)

Zim bit his lip and tried to swallow the wavery feelings that made his pulse hammer and his hands tremble. He'd hardly noticed that he was afraid. He was trained to ignore those feelings, after all.

He folded his arms over his chest. "You're a human. A dead human. I'm not afraid of you!"

(but you are)

"Nope!"

(SELF-DECEIVER YOU CANNOT EVEN TEAR YOUR OWN FLESH)

Zim scratched the back of his hand a little, leaving a small white line.

(YOU WILL NOT BLEED)

"I could if I wanted to," he said. "I just don't want to, okay? OKAY?" He gestured at the spectral corpse on the floor, which was now rotted to skeleton. "Why would I do that? And trap myself in this rotting wooden house when the Irkens are masters of the stars? Please." He shoved his hands into his pockets.

Dib was kneeling on the floor to film Zim dead-on instead of at an angle. Zim found this unnecessary and condescending.

He thrust his chest out and threw back his shoulders. "Why don't you fight me instead of hiding and saying silly, insulting things into my head? You are the one who fears Zim!"

(self-deceiver)

"You said that already."

(creature of deceit and hate)

Zim recoiled, feeling something hit him in the face. He brushed something off his cheek and looked at it. It was... ghost spit. The ghost had spat on him.

That was just... wrong. His throat locked up and he quietly wiped his face on his sleeve and his hand on his jeans.

The ghost didn't seem to be feeling talkative anymore. Zim tried another door a little further down the hallway. It opened onto a small closet that contained only a hamper full of writhing black beetles. "Okay," Zim muttered to himself. He'd been hoping for a staircase or balcony, something that would lead to an exit.

"Ask the ghost why I can't hear her directly," Dib said.

Instead, Zim said... "I notice you've had some kind of... corrective head surgery." Zim found he was gesturing vaguely at his forehead as if he expected his words not to carry his meaning for him- a silly thought. He was very articulate, he knew that. "Why did that... happen?"

Dib lowered the video camera, sneering, and Zim realized he'd thought the head remark was directed at him. "That's one of the worst ones yet," he said.

"Not you, the ghost! Be quiet!"

"Ooh," Dib said, hefting the camera. Zim tried to ignore him.

He waited, and waited, and had decided she wouldn't answer when

(((they operated to make me better)))

"You were sick in the brains?"

Another long pause.

(((yes...)))

"How so?"

She once again made Zim wait several minutes for her answer. He put his hands on his hips and tapped his foot.

(((i was like you)))

Zim felt his body tense and heard his own rather melodramatic gasp before he could think.

(((i am no longer like you)))

He should scoff at this. She was human. He wasn't. They weren't alike and never could have been alike.

But...

(((stay with me)))

(((i will be nice)))

(((i won't hurt you)))

"You spat on me," Zim said.

(((it is hard for us to be nice)))

(((you know this)))

((KILLER))

Zim cleared his throat and re-adjusted his stupid rough stiff awful human pants. "If you want to show me... er... niceness, then perhaps you could just... let me leave."

(((then you'd be gone)))

"Uh... no. I'd come back. With, uh... with more comfortable pants. You see-"

"Uh, yeah, I've seen more than I wanted to," Dib interjected. "Could you maybe stop doing that? You're on camera, you know. Why is it that whenever I turn on my video camera you start throwing up or taking your clothes off?"

Zim's eyes narrowed.

(((you will NOT return)))

She was right, of course. If... er... when he left this place, he'd never come back inside. In fact, he was toying with the idea of burning the-

(YOU WILL NOT BURN MY HOUSE)

Oh... okay... okay then, he wouldn't...

Zim felt a hand slap his cheek. Hard.

He rubbed the tingling spot where the blow had landed. He wasn't fond of being slapped, or spat on, but he supposed it was better than being forced to commit suicide. Still.

"STOP THAT!" he screamed. He had intended an imperious command but he sounded hoarse, shrill and unpleasant.

((say you'll stay))

"I will NOT stay here!" He stomped his foot to add emphasis. "You're horrible! You're so horrib-"

He couldn't breathe.

Zim fell to his knees. His vision clouded over.

"Hey," Dib said, tugging at his shoulder.

Zim couldn't answer. His throat was all bunched up and no air could get through.

"Zim?"

((got you))

Before then the mental words had changed in force and volume but had had no other tone, and no evidence of emotion. Now they were unmistakably satisfied.

Something fell into Zim's hands. He stared down at it. Air rushed down his throat. It tasted foul, the whole place did, but it was a definite improvement over not breathing.

The thing in his hands was a carved wooden disk. It looked stupid. It looked all sloppy, it looked like a little kid had made it.

His hands tightened on it. He was still sucking in air as if he was in danger of running out of it- well, he could be in danger of running out, he didn't know. He looked up and the house they were in was now much smaller, and somehow paler, and there were crumbled away bits of the walls and ceiling.

"Wow," Dib breathed. "I think it was feeding off of your life energy to effect the haunting. That's a protective talisman. I was wearing one the whole time, that must be why the ghost didn't go for me!"

Zim nodded, although he had no idea what any of that meant. His skin felt cold all over. He pressed the talisman to his chest. If it really had dispelled the ghost, he wanted to keep it forever.

Dib inched forward, testing the floor with his feet before he stood on it. When one board creaked ominously he drew back. "Wow," he said again. "Take that back off and see what happens," he suggested.

"No," Zim muttered, clutching the talisman even tighter. A stray splinter stuck into his hand. He flinched but didn't relax his grip.

It certainly did look hand-made. Had Dib made this? It had the face from Dib's shirt painted on it.

Human surgery was barbaric. That woman's brain must have been completely mutilated. Zim could not imagine ever wanting to tear open his own flesh that way... but of course, he wasn't human.

Dib had the option to take off his own protective talisman, and he wasn't taking it off. The reeking human looked at his watch. "Gosh darnit. I have school in an hour," he sighed.

Zim had done enough research to cover the day, he believed. He'd skip school.

He got to his feet. "Take me home, Dib," he ordered, and it sounded like an order, all firm and not shaky- good.

"Why would I do th-"

"Home!"

"Come o-"

"HOME, DIB, NOW!" His hands shook.

Dib snorted and rolled his eyes. "Oh, all right. If I leave you here you'll probably just wreck the place."

Zim followed Dib out of the house, carefully picking his way along the floor. All sizes of rotten places had suddenly appeared in the woodwork and Zim's knees were shaking and making it difficult to navigate.

Dib narrated to the camera as they went. "Unfortunately I have to cut my investigation short due to... extenuating circumstances. It's Zim's fault. He was going to get himself killed and I've spent too many hours carefully observing and cultivating a system of communication with this live alien specimen to let him be absorbed into the ether." No, Dib was an incompetent human smeet and had to go to skool. "Not to mention he knows too many things that I'm carefully guarding from the spirit world."

Zim had a pounding headache and didn't care about any of this.

Dib stopped and turned to film the inside of the house some more. "Note that the house fell into instant disrepair when it was cut off from Zim's energy. You've just witnessed an alien powered ghost phenomenon involving the famed Lady of Malo Lupo!"

Zim sighed and rolled the talisman between his palms. Infomercials sounded like a good idea. They were excellent research and sometimes gave him brilliant new weapon ideas. He would watch infomercials for hours and eat chips when he got home. And wear soft pants.

* * *

Three days later.

Zim leaned back in the computer chair, folding his hands together.

The YouTube video was called "Alien Energy Fueled Haunting By Lady of Malo Lupo 100% Real Not Fake THE TRUTH!"

The top comments were:

kid taping this needs to stfu his voice makes me want to shoot a kitten

and

green chick is hott

Zim scrolled through the video by clicking at random places in the time bar. There was that horrible house, only in the video it looked the same way the whole time, broken down and crumbling and filled with dust. The injured woman didn't show up on film at all. The only things of interest on the tape were Zim and Dib- the latter enthusiastically narrating things that weren't happening and the former-

Zim flinched and picked up the phone, holding it up to his face. "I found the video," he said when Dib picked up the other end.

"Good! This is what happens when you interfere with my research, Zim. It just gives me more material!"

"Uh huh," Zim said, pinning the phone between the side of his head and his shoulder and typing into the comments box.

"We're closing in on you, you know. Me and my entire organization."

Zim doubted Dib really had an organization. He finished his comment and hit 'send'.

"Imagine a noose drawing around your neck except the noose is made up of determined men and women who've all pledged to ridding the world of genocidal alien scum..." Dib trailed off. Zim heard clicking noises. "Hey! They can see the video for themselves, you know. They know it's real. Leaving nasty comments won't help you."

Zim shrugged a little.

Dib started typing. "Why haven't you been in school, anyway?"

Zim said nothing. Something black moved at the edge of his vision, or appeared to move. He did not turn his head to look in its direction.

"Hey..." Dib stopped typing. "You got what you wanted, didn't you?"

"What?"

"You followed me to that house because you wanted attention!"

"What? No."

"Oh, come on," Dib said. "You do it every time I take a break from investigating you. Suddenly, I turn around and there you are, popping up like a weed."

"I don't..."

"Get lonely being evil, Zim? I guess it's hard to make friends when you're planning on killing everyone, overthrowing your leaders and taking control of everything in the universe. When you're not even good at ruling stuff."

THAT plan was PRIVATE. Zim sputtered.

Dib kept talking. He never stopped TALKING. "Thing is it's... really not my fault that you're not good with people. Find someone less important to bother, okay?"

He hung up.

Zim put the phone down. His chest heaved.

That was all very well for Dib. Humans came with built-in partial genetic copies that were, for the most part, pre-programmed to feel attachment to each other. Dib had no concept of what it was like to be...

((alone))

Ridiculous. Irkens didn't care about such things.

Zim sucked the lining of his lower lip in between his teeth and nibbled it a little. He felt a crease form between his eyebrows.

((you have me))

Zim closed his eyes. "Leave me alone."

((you thought i could only stay in my house))

The voice of the ghost was definitely changing. She had the capacity now to sound pleased, rather gloating and obnoxious, actually.

Zim snatched up the talisman from the desk. The voice went silent.

There was a sticky, cold layer of sweat on his forehead.

"He'll pay," Zim said aloud, to no one. He liked the sound of his own voice. He liked hearing it every so often.

"He'll pay for this."

* * *

a/n: it will never be continued. it's a oneshot. this is all there is.


End file.
